A Taste of New York is a new time-lapse film that has been getting a lot of attention since it was published. It features some new and interesting techniques and a lot of motion designing. We had a quick interview with the creators of the video.
The times when time-lapse videos were just simple compilations of tripod clips with music in background are long gone. Today’s best time-lapse videos are all about motion, story and sound design – something that Austria-based video production company FilmSpektakel is well aware of. Their latest piece is the third instalment in their independent A Taste Of… series, and this time they bring us to New York City.
Peter Jablonowski, Thomas Pöcksteiner and Lorenz Pritz are the filmmakers behind this time-lapse film. They spent ten days in NYC in September 2016, during which they set out to collect a lot of great angles – including from an actual helicopter. They shot 65,000 photos, which took up 2,6 TB of storage space. The final 3-minute video took 36 hours to render on the best-equipped iMac available.
Skyline timelapse clip. Image credit: FilmSpektakel
One of the most interesting shots in the video is the clip of the yellow cabs. The guys took photos of yellow cabs whenever they got a chance, covering them from as many different angles as possible. They gathered 2,000 photos in total and compiled them into a hyper lapse around a cab in post production. It took them 5 whole days of post work to get this one shot.
We asked Peter Jablonowski a few questions about the video:
c5D: How did you come up with the idea of going to New York to shoot the next episode in your A Taste Of… series?
Peter: We always had the plan to try our A Taste Of… series on an international level, so we were looking for a country or city to do this experiment in. We’ve been to New York two times before so we already knew the city, which made it easier for us to accomplish this project.
c5D: I guess that the Yellow Cab clip was the hardest and most time-consuming clip in the video, especially from a post-production point of view. Are there any other clips that were also difficult to shoot? Did you have to overcome any extraordinary obstacles to get the exact angle you wanted?
Peter: The helicopter ride was one of the best and at the same time most challenging things we experienced in NYC. We had never been on a helicopter before and flying in between those skyscrapers is pure adrenaline. Trying to take stable pictures while having the doors off is extremely difficult. We first tried it with the help of a single-handed gimbal (CAME-TV Single) which worked fine when the helicopter hovered above one place, but during movement it failed completely because of the strong winds. Most of the helicopter shots in the video are hand-held and stabilized in post production.
The helicopter shot was handheld. Image credit: FilmSpektakel
c5D: Did you have any problems with the police or other authorities when setting up tripods and all the gear on the streets? Did you have to get any permissions for all that?
Peter: Luckily we had no problems with police at all. We were well aware of where tripods are allowed (on the streets, etc.) and where and when tripods they are forbidden. In these cases, we knew how to make do with sand bags, magic arms or even with a stack of tissues. For each location we tried to bring as little gear as possible so we wouldn’t attract too much attention. The authorities were very friendly and appreciated our awareness of the rules and laws.
c5D: Any funny BTS stories of your NYC shoot?
Peter: Building security kicked us out of our Airbnb after a few nights because it was being let illegally. We didn’t know anything about that, so we had no plan B when security told us to be gone within one hour or else the cops would show up. Airbnb handled it very well and booked us a hotel right next to Times Square, so we were lucky after all to be right in the city center.
c5D: Do you already have a plan for the next episode in the A Taste Of… series? If you do, which location do you have in sight?
Peter: Yes, we are continuing these A Taste Of… videos, and in fact the next episode has already been shot. To be honest, we are not quite sure when to release it… It will be in a few more months in the future, I guess… Where the next one will take place is still a secret, but if you are following us on Facebook, you could already take a good guess ;-)
Getting multiple clips at once. Image credit: FilmSpektakel
In terms of equipment, FilmSpektakel used a Sony A7R II, Sony a6300 and two Canon 6D bodies. There is a full list of equipment along with other additional information directly in the video description on the Vimeo link. All episodes of A Taste Of… have received a Vimeo Staff Pick award, so it is really worth watching the older pieces too. Links for those are also in the Vimeo page of the video.
Feeling inspired to shoot a time-lapse video now? Do you have any samples you would like to share? Let us know in the comments below!

HyperZoom inventor Geoff Tomkinson was the first person to start producing digital time-lapse before the advent of DSLRs, and several of his videos have been selected as Vimeo Staff Picks. His technique incorporates hyper-lapse, impossibly long zooms and hidden transitions with the use of layers in 3D space in After Effects. Read on for all about HyperZoom in this guest post from Geoff himself!
Geoff Tompkinson
The Origins of HyperZoom
During my time as the only full-time professional time-lapse shooter producing stock material for ImageBank Film – then Getty – I developed a number of skills. These included everything from how to achieve smooth day to night transitions with smooth colour balance change working with only JPGs as Raw was not then available, to how to build an intervalometer. Most importantly, I learned the ability to use nested resolution comps to enable extreme zoom without the need for expensive zoom lenses.
While teaching an After Effects-based time-lapse class in Istanbul, my audience was blown away by a zoom-out shot that started on an ant on a leaf and ended several miles away across a lake in New Hampshire. I realized then that perhaps I should put some effort into a project I had been thinking about for a while, whereby I would effectively be able to ‘travel’ with the zoom. That’s how the HyperZoom technique was born.
How to HyperZoom
HyperZoom is a suite of techniques, both in the way the footage is shot and in the way it is post-produced. The goal is to make a virtual seamless ‘flight’ through a series of locations. These locations could be in their real positions or they could be many miles apart and made to appear as if next to each other.
What’s paradoxical about these videos that feature a huge amount of movement is that for the most part the rule is to not actually move or zoom the camera during capture, as most of the movement is produced in virtual 3D space. The exceptions are when I use hyper-lapse or rotary head shots as part of the sequence, but these camera-moving techniques should also fit in seamlessly with the virtual movement so there is no loss of visual continuity.
But why does HyperZoom work? When we look at a photograph of a car for instance, the only way we can tell if it’s a toy car or a real car — if viewing the scene from a single viewpoint — is to move the viewpoint itself and see what happens to the parallax shift between the car and its surroundings. If we shoot the scene as a series of layers related to their depth positions within the scene, we can reassemble these layers in 3D space in post-production.
This separation of every scene into depth layers means that editing cannot be done in a conventional editor like Premiere or Final Cut, using After Effects instead in order to move a virtual camera to navigate the layers. The nature of this reassembly means that some scenes also require extreme rotoscoping work.
The Making of Upper Austria – An Incredible Journey
We were approached by the Upper Austrian Tourist Board back in January 2016 to use our HyperZoom technique to produce a seamless flight through a series of selected locations throughout Upper Austria.
For this project, we produced a storyboard and flight plan that would enable us to smoothly pass through all the locations with no cuts. This involved us traveling all over Upper Austria to recce the locations and decide, shot by shot, how we would proceed.
I needed to be sure I could escape from any given location by flying over the horizon. This meant adding more capability to the system so we could fly over mountains and through trees. I was pretty confident I could do this, and the technique developed and improved as the project progressed.
It’s very important with a production like this to maintain a consistent lighting angle as the camera passes between and through scenes, and that sky conditions match from one scene to the next. We used the fantastic PhotoPills app to enable us to accurately plan shooting angles, times and date ranges that would work for us.
The PhotoPills app
The big problem with shooting a video that covers several seasons and hundreds of square miles is always the weather. The sequence order of the locations is often dictated by the particular situations, as we always have to have an entry and exit technique that blends seamlessly with what goes before and after. That’s why post-production is often handled in out-of-sequence sections, and integrated with other sections once they have been shot. This actually makes post-production even harder as we cannot just proceed in a linear fashion through the video.
That said, one thing I spend a lot of effort in explaining to clients is that changing the sequence of events or inserting or removing a location involves an extreme amount of work since it can have roll-on effects both before and after that extend to many scenes. This is one of the drawbacks compared to a regular video edit, where these sort of changes are very easy to make.
In terms of post-production, we had to install extra hard-drive capability and increase the number of available render nodes. Working with multiple 8K sequences inside After Effects meant that everything had to be done with proxies to enable a more fluid working experience, as these projects tend to get very complex.
Partial After Effects project flow diagram
A Closer Look at Some of the Scenes
The Opening Shot (00:00 – 00:30)
This shot took many months and several visits before we finally had the correct weather conditions to shoot it. We also wanted to use the same ship in all three scenes (from above, from behind and inside), but the ship’s schedule meant the vessel would only pass us once per day. Each shot of the ship needed a different day.
From a post-production perspective, this shot was quite complex as it required accurate timing of the camera move to fit smoothly into the walking of the cyclists and the use of the smartphone. The extreme resolution requirements for the move towards and through the phone meant that this cyclist sequence had to be shot using four cameras firing in synchrony as fast as they could. As with many other parts of this video, we found working with Mocha Pro for the rotoscoping and tracking work was a great help.
The Lentos Museum (01:24 – 01:31)
The idea here was to have a long run through the art museum exhibition space and exit the building on the other side. The problem was that there was no window to exit through. I decided, with the agreement of the Lentos, to build my own end wall and window using the same style as the other windows in the building.
ARS Electronica and Musiktheater Linz Transitions (01:38 – 02:18)
The ARS Electronica sequence used 5 different camera positions and a hyperlapse turn through the final room before freeze-framing into a poster to rapidly move to the next daytime scene. This poster board doesn’t actually exist in this location, and was comped in from a different part of the city and modified to fit our requirements.
The final shot in the theatre required a massive rotoscoping job that involved tracking the windows, tables, chairs, menu cards, etc., as the camera passes through the cafeteria into the distant view over the rooftops of Linz. This rotoscoping job alone took several weeks of solid work for what in the final movie lasts for around 4 seconds. Thanks once again to Mocha Pro for providing such great tools to assist with this laborious task.
5Fingers – Dachstein (04:00 – 04:10)
In order to be able to maintain fluid motion over and past the platform as if using a drone, we needed to rotoscope the entire platform and all the people moving around on it frame by frame, person by person. Several weeks’ work again for just 6 seconds of video.
Finale (05-35 – 05:45)
We had decided to finish by flying over the trees towards one of the most beautiful scenes in Upper Austria – The Gosau Glacier. However, we soon realised we would have a better finish if we went into the glacier, then slid across it and retreated to reveal its beautiful sunset reflection in Lake Gosau below.
All in all, the project took around 8 months to complete – including the inspired original music and sound design by Vincent Jacq and Xavier Plouchart. We are very grateful to the Upper Austrian Tourist Board for their enthusiasm, support and funding of this project. It was great to be working on a schedule that allowed sufficient time for final polishing as well as technique-development along the way.
So there you have it, a close look at the HyperZoom technique by the man himself, Geoff Tompkinson. Want some more HyperZooming? Check out HyperZooming Through Hallstatt, a Vimeo Staff Pick just like An Incredible Journey.